Scott-Coe's Essay
Submitted by Ed Appel on Tue, 2005-08-02 09:19
I certainly agree with both Hawhee and Fitzgerald that it's time to push Burke's RHETORIC OF RELIGION more into the mainstream, not just for its insight into the forms of language (it's surely gotten its share of attention, within Burke studies, on that score), but also for its shrewd commentary on the imperatives of human nature. At the panel on Burke and education at NCA last month, Robert Wess raised the question of why there's so much religiosity in the air right now. The woman sitting next to him on the plane (I think it was) reading her Bible, among other mainifestations of Christian faith to cross his path, apparently filled him with wonder and trepidation. Where's all this presumptive fanaticism---the gist of Bob's inquiry---coming from in this enlightened day and age? I responded with Burke's definition of logology---the systematic study of theological terms for the light they may throw on the forms of language---with its implicit assertion that theological concepts and beliefs will surely be with us always, even unto the end of the age.
I should have gone further with that thought, however. It's Burke's philosophy that can explain the recrudescence of Fundamentalism in our time, not any positivism, empiricism, or scientism. From a scientistic standpoint, red-state revulsion at rampant sexuality and secularism in our popular culture is inexplicable. To a modernist, maybe even postmodernist, mindset, liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick's naive prediction of 75 years ago would make eminent sense: Someday everybody's going to think like me. The dictates of the hortatory negative and its perfectionist residues will be rescinded. Under the irresistible weight of scientific demystifications, religion, except in its etiolated mainstream forms, will wither.
In my view, Scott-Coe brilliantly brings these issues to the fore once again. She makes Burke's inherently theological system (well, Chesebro called it a System in the title of HIS book) stand out clearly, figure/ground, in apt comparison with Augustine and counterpositioning with Ramus. Was Burke a theologian, and if so, what kind? Scott-Coe offers some neat stuff in partial answer to that query. (A definitive answer is not in the offing to that, as well as many other, questions about Burke and his philosophy.)
I hope to get to some of this neat stuff in later posts. If I can find them in my deep files, I might share, also, a couple of Burke's epistolary answers to my claim that he was, in fact, a theologain of a kind.
Poet, then actor, then theologian---aren't those the metaphors Burke proposed, in serial progression, for the symbol-using animal?
If you dare, tell me that's not so.
Comments
Now, when I say Burke's dramatism/logology is nihilistic, somewhat like ancient gnosticism, I mean it has a streak of nihilism in it. As in respect to most things, Burke is both-and here rather than either/or. His text is comedy; his subtext, tragedy. His prescription centers in slap-on-the-wrist instruction and correction of the clown (with, perhaps, the establishment of some social distance for a limited period of time), but his description so often laments seemingly ever-recurrent, severe punishment, banishment, or death to the enemy. Burke's climactic characterization of human symbolic action in GM features the disease metaphor. He urges constant hypochondriasis on his readers, morbid vigilance in respect to the intrinsic morbidities of symbol-use. As I said, his bottom line focuses on humankind's dramatic rottenness, not their hierarchal glories. Their wondrous technological rationality, late Burke opines, is driven by irrational compulsions that, in tar-baby fashion, might even someday lunarize their life and landscape.
Getting back to the expressly theological dimensions of dramatism/logology, Scott-Coe's explicit concern, not that the rant above doesn't relate to it:
In a footnote, Scott-Coe says, Appel himself eventually argues that Burke's dramatism is ultimately negative, and that therefore 'religious people should approach dramatism with caution.' I should have modified that statement a bit in the article she refers to. Orthodox Christian believers should approach dramatism/logology with caution. I offered in that piece that Burke's philosophy/theology is something of a quasi-gnostic universalism friendly to process theology. Process theologians need not qpproach Burke with caution, nor Unitarian Universalists, nor liberal religionists in general. Burke's thought is not incompatible with theism any more than those bleak and pessimistic varieties of gnosticism were in the first few centuries of our era. What Burke appears to deconstruct, or cast doubt on, to use Derrida's term loosely, is the Christian drama or any such transcendental account of disorder-guilt-sacrifice-and-redemption. Such speculations would seem to be a perfected transcendental projection of the generic human drama. Even Burke's cryptic aspersions on the embarrassments of superdrama at the conclusion of GM can be finessed by the refinements of process theology, wherein God is seen as bipolar---transcendent and imminent, eternal and temporal, infinite and finite.
One way or the other, Burke's reputed personal skepticism is negatied by the internal dynamics of his philosophy: Teleology, transcendence, and perfectionism of some valence or variety are inevitable. Even determinism implies a determiner (GM). God-terms of a thoroughly mundane kind can never ultimately satisfy the symbol-using animal. As Burke says, God [and, eventually, at the climax of the development, the god-term] is general AND personal (RM, I believe). Wayne Booth and the rest of us, including Scott-Coe, who have argued for appreciation of the theological implications of Burke's work have made a strong case, I do believe---despite Burke's persistent demurrers.
I'll get to some of those demurrers later, if I can cull them from deep within my files.